Wing Chun Masters
Yesterday
Bruce Lee, Globalization and the Case of Wing Chun: Why do Some Chinese Martial Arts Grow?
(pt. 1)
Wing Chun and the Haters
You do not have to be involved with the Chinese martial arts for very long to discover that Wing Chun has the potential to be a highly polarizing topic of conversation. Those within in the Wing Chun community have an almost evangelical zeal for their art and are generally ready to hold forth with a long exposition on the brilliance of the system. Of course all martial artists are dedicated to their styles. It takes a lot of devotion to do anything for decades. But there are a handful of styles (Wing Chun, MMA, Taijiquan) that seem to encourage such a high degree of enthusiasm that it becomes a virtual “world view.”
This tendency is not always appreciated in the broader martial arts community. Wing Chun is in a particular delicate situation. While Taiji may have numbers, cultural prestige and the weight of history on its side, Wing Chun is a relatively new art, practically unknown until the 1960s, and much more likely to be practiced by individuals outside of mainland China (and even Hong Kong) than within it.
This sudden success and lack of “real history” has caused a certain degree of resentment. For instance, the important early student of the Chinese martial arts R. W. Smith never liked Wing Chun, and firmly believed that all of the martial arts of Guangdong were rubbish. Bruce Lee irritated him to no end, and he never hesitated to give his opinion on these subjects.
Of course Bruce Lee is the central figure in this entire discussion. Despite frequent attempts to claim him for one tradition or another, Wing Chun was the only style that this martial arts virtuoso and film star ever formally studied. He personally introduced not just his own teacher (Ip Man) to the American martial arts community, but also much of the reformist rhetoric that had emerged in China in the 1930s. If you reread Lee’s famous essay asking Americans to “liberate themselves from classical Karate” you will hear more than the faint echo of the Jingwu and Guoshu movements in his ideas.
These early writings, as well as his TV appearance as Kato in the Green Hornet, vaulted Lee to stardom among western martial artists. Nevertheless, it was his film Enter the Dragon (1973) made him the first truly global Chinese superstar. Fans found his brand of martial bravado intoxicating. Everyone wanted to do what he did, and then he was gone. Lee’s sudden death left fans reeling, and in their attempt to come to terms with what had just happened they turned to Wing Chun both to understand their idol and to find the path of personal liberation that he had promised them. Popular interest in the Chinese martial arts exploded. Not surprisingly Wing Chun was the greatest beneficiary of this unexpected, and largely undeserved, windfall.
Or so the story goes. Yet as you look more closely at the actual history of how Wing Chun came to the West things become unexpectedly complicated. Bruce Lee himself is an enigma. He taught martial arts in America, but very quickly moved away from the Wing Chun that he had learned from Ip Man in Hong Kong. In fact, Lee had never even seen most of the Wing Chun system. All of the (reliable) accounts I have read indicate that while very talented, he was still working his way through Chum Kiu when he came to America. He had not studied Biu Jee, the actual dummy form, the pole or the knives before leaving Hong Kong for the first time.
While Lee was a relentless promoter of the Chinese martial tradition, it is not at all clear to me that he did much to promote Wing Chun. In fact, one could make the argument that his diatribe against the “classical styles” was read as applying just as much to Wing Chun (an art which he had “outgrown”) as it did to karate or judo. In that sense some of Lee’s fans seem to have taken up Wing Chun despite him.
But there are larger problems with this narrative as well. Enter the Dragon was not the first martial arts film seen in America. It found its initial audience precisely because by the early 1970s there was already a subculture of non-Chinese urban Americans that would routinely venture into the small theaters of Chinatown to watch Shaw Brothers productions. Nor was Lee the first Chinese-American actor to dream of making it big in America.
There have been many action super-stars since then, yet for the most part they did not have the same effect on the movie going public as Bruce Lee. Stallone did not create a decades long resurgence in the popularity of amateur boxing when Rocky came out. Very few people took up professional body building because of Conan the Barbarian or the Terminator. And while everyone who watches action movies knows Jet Li’s face, Wushu is still struggling for acceptance in the western martial arts community. Yes, Bruce Lee was a unique cultural phenomenon, but so was Rocky. It does not appear that having a star on your side is enough to ignite a trend.
More interestingly, the subsequent Ip Man movies, and even Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, did lead to noticeable spikes in Wing Chun class enrollments. Yet these films were not nearly as popular as either Enter the Dragon or Rocky. Sherlock Holmes was a hit in theaters, but it clearly was not a “martial arts” film (even if the fight scenes were very well done). While Ip Man was popular among martial arts movies fans, it was never shown on that many screens in the US. For most viewers it was actually a “direct to DVD affair.” Yet these two productions did have a notable impact on the Wing Chun community.
So what exactly is going on here? I hope that by briefly exploring the popularity of Wing Chun we will better understand why some Chinese martial arts succeed in the global market place while others struggle. We may even learn something about the nature of our interconnected world along the way.
-BY BENJUDKINS
